Reconviction Rates in Scotland: 2021-22 Offender Cohort

Background

Recidivism and reconvictions

Recidivism is where someone has committed an offence and received some form of criminal justice sanction and goes on to commit another offence. Measuring recidivism is important, as it is one indicator of the effectiveness of the criminal justice system in the rehabilitation of offenders. Reconviction rates are a proxy measure for recidivism, as not all offending comes to the attention of the police, and not all offences committed or recorded by the police will necessarily result in a conviction (see Annex A1).

Data Source: The Scottish Offenders Index

Information on reconvictions presented in this bulletin is derived from the Scottish Offenders Index (SOI), which is derived from a subset of the Criminal Proceedings in Scotland dataset. The SOI contains all convictions in court since 1989 where the main offence involved was either a crime in Groups 1-5 of the Scottish Government’s classification of crimes, or some of the offences in Group 6. See Annex D of the Criminal Proceedings Bulletin for further information about these classification groups. Minor offences, such as drunkenness and the majority of vehicle offences, are excluded from the SOI. This data source is also used in Section four to calculate the number and type of previous convictions, which looks back in time at conviction history before the index conviction, as opposed to reconvictions which look at convictions after the index conviction.

A separate dataset in the SOI also contains information on non-court disposals given by the police and COPFS since 2008. This contains non-court disposals given for all crimes and offences, including motor vehicle offences.

The court convictions and non-court disposals are held in separate datasets by the Scottish Government and so are independent of each other and analysed separately in this bulletin.

See Annex B1, Annex B3, and Annex 17 for more details.